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nytheatre.com
review
Scott Mendelsohn • December 15, 2005
With a twinkle in her eye, a librarian (played by the luminous Kathryn
Grody) welcomes us into her domain. Searchers and researchers inhabit
her library’s bottomless stacks, hunting for clues to their
existential mysteries. A trucker (Happy Anderson) comes seeking
something to fill his lonesome nights on the road. She leads him
to some Steinbeck, in hardback: a tome hefty and intriguing enough
to keep him away from prostitutes. A father (Michael Rudko), urgently
wanting to offer his daughter spiritual guidance, sifts through
footnotes and uncovers the story of an astronomer who lost his position
over a morals charge. And a government functionary, tracking terrorists
through their library records, abandons his mission when offered
a quote from William Carlos Williams: “It is difficult / to
get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for
lack / of what is found there.”
At its best, an evening of one-act plays serves up a sampler of
such necessary slivers of poetry. Susan Miller’s Reading
List, the final play of the evening, concludes with a cacophonous
hymn to the vast world of ideas that suggests the evening’s
accomplishments in miniature. . .
. . . Miller’s Reading List, which
digs deep, takes risks, and succeeds beautifully. Whereas the other
pieces are remarkably focused and concise, this one is messy. Expansively
directed by Cynthia Croot, it relies less on logic and plot than
on the root faith that calls plays into being. Miller begins by
invoking a sense of alarm, familiar among liberal theatre audiences,
at the current assaults on our freedom of speech. More than just
ringing that alarm, though, Miller portrays an array of characters,
ordinary people armed with their own particular slices of knowledge
against the paranoia behind these assaults.
In a series of fantastic encounters, Reading List cracks
the naturalistic frame that has so far given shape to the evenings’
plays. With her story fragments and parables, Miller sermonizes
in direct contradiction to the paranoia that assaults creative freedom.
Grody’s librarian, the ringleader in Reading List,
appears quite ordinary: a heavyset, frizzy-haired middle-aged woman
who spends hours attending to the minutiae of her field. But the
spark in Grody’s eyes ignites the ideas that have been flashing
across the stage, not just in her play but throughout the evening.
Led by Grody, the excellent cast shows Miller’s play to be
a recipe for alchemy, transforming a brief evening of well-wrought
scenes into theatrical gold.
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